Exemplary

New Delhi, Oct. 7: Bengal’s CPM-led government has received a pat from overseas — from not Cuba or China but the land of the “imperialists”.

One of America’s oldest think tanks has held up Bengal’s madarsas as models of secularism, leaving the CPM, which often accuses the US of plotting to overthrow its government, preening.

The Brookings Doha Center, Washington, has said that Pakistan, where the radical Islamisation is blamed a great deal on madarsas, should learn from such schools in Bengal and emulate them.

It should be music to the CPM, worried about losing its minority base to the Bengal Opposition.

“The current radicalisation of madrassas in Pakistan should not lead us to give up in despair,” says the US centre’s August 2009 policy briefing on “Pakistan’s Madrassas: The Need for Internal Reform and the Role of International Assistance”.

“In other parts of the Muslim world, madrassas have served an appropriate educational purpose. For example in West Bengal, India, a survey of Islamic schools in January 2009 found that because of the higher quality of education at madrassas, even non-Muslims were actively enrolling in them.”

The study says that just as, in Pakistan, many Muslim families send their children to Christian schools “because of the high quality of teaching and discipline”, many Hindus in Bengal send their children to madarsas.

“Hindu enrolment in several Bengali madrassas, for example, was as high as 64 per cent because many of these institutions offered vocational training programs. Such examples can certainly be emulated in Pakistani madrassas as well,” the study says.

The CPM is happy. “I think it’s a recognition of our good work. It’s heartening to note that the study advises Pakistan to emulate the Bengal model,” said Abdus Sattar, Bengal minister for minority development.

The Bengal government says it has ensured quality and progressiveness in madarsa syllabuses. The Bengal madarsa board is the only such member of the Council of Boards for School Education in India, an umbrella organisation of all school boards in the country.

The Brookings Doha Center, formed in 2007, is a project of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, Washington.

It researches “the socio-economic and geopolitical issues facing Muslim-majority states and communities, and encourages increased dialogue between policy makers from the US and the Muslim world”.